Brennan Manning, in a talk given during a chapel service at Seattle Pacific University in 1997 moved me so deeply that I could not help but sob and let the God of love re-wire my heart just a bit - taking it closer to the true image of God.
I've got a one and a half year old son. He's incredible. Shortly after his birth, I went to the local bookstore and purchased a copy of The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. I had actually never read it before. I was excited to read it both to myself and to my son. So, I wrote a nice little note to Robin in the sleeve about how we'll read this book to our kids for years to come, hugs and kisses, that sort of thing. A few months went by and I forgot about the book. Then one day, it caught my eye, and I thought, "Oh, yeah, I forgot we bought that!" So, I picked it up and in the quiet hours of a particular morning, I read it from start to finish. I hated it.
It made me so upset that I tried to talk Robin into letting me throw it in the trash can. "Why?" She asked, and added, "That's one of my favorite books of all time!"
"Really?" I asked surprisingly. Upon her "yes," I began to really try and find out what she thought was so great about it. The way I saw it was simple. A loving tree, gives herself away to a completely selfish & self-centered boy who never sees the generosity of the tree and takes advantage of it every chance he gets. I thought it was extremely dark and disturbing. A very sad story. I had such a charged reaction to it, but had no idea why. Then one day, I found out.
I wrote an entry called, "God's Love" in October of 2008. This was the day, I ran across Brennan Manning's teaching. So, traveling back in time,now, it's a cold morning in Seattle, and Brennan says...
I had a Jewish friend named Saul growing up in Brooklyn. Everyday, we'd run down to the park with our overalls and buckets, play in the sand and talk about what we were going to do with our lives when we got big.
They grew up and Brennan became a priest, and Saul joined the Army. Many years later, on a serendipitous day in Brooklyn, they ran into one another.
Saul had told me that he had recently converted to Christianity...I asked Saul, "What's your understanding of Jesus?" Saul replied, "Let me think about it and I'll tell you tomorrow." The next day, we met up and what he said to me moved me so deeply that I urged to have it published. A year later he did and it's become the best selling book in the Harper & Row publishing company. This, Saul said, is my understanding of Jesus:"
"When the tree gives himself away to the boy," Saul said, "I'm reminded of when Paul writes in Philippians, that Christ, "Emptied himself...he emptied himself."
When I heard this, I broke down and sobbed so heavily that I had to sit down with my head between my knees. It dawned on me that the reason I hated the book, was that I was the little boy in the story. I wanted him to repair the tree or give back to it, or somehow, at least deserve the tree's generosity! But he was clueless. Like me. It was in that moment, in the "bright darkness of faith" that I realized, God loves me not because of what I do or don't do, say or don't say...in faith and in faithlessness, in prayer and in prayerlessness, in glory and in shame, in victory and rotten sin, in power and in weakness, in clean or dirty garments - he gives himself away so that I might feel loved, accepted, and experience true joy.
